^{(Summery: As an experienced ST who has run over four dozen games, Pacifist is one of my favorite Townsfolk to both play as and run as an ST, especially in BMR. This is my extensive analysis of how to run the role in a fun and engaging manner that keeps player agency and makes the role fun to play with and against, as opposed to it being considered a hindrance. To skip to the point where I summarise the way I find Pacifist is best run, scroll to the bottom.})

Pacifist (Townsfolk): "Executed good players might not die."

Simple, right? It's one of those goofy roles that can only work in the context of Clocktower. Goodies who the town tries to kill might not die-- ST's treat. It's not a bad concept, it really isn't: a safety net role given to good is a unique niche to fill, and this role is meant to slide neatly into that niche. On paper, it doesn't even look that bad: it can't save evil, so what's the problem?

Well, as it turns out, this simple, six-word ability has somehow managed to become the most hated Townsfolk in all of Clocktower. People look at the role and immediately hate its design. They hate drawing it, they hate hearing about it in games, they hate it when it does something, they hate it when it doesn't do anything. Pretty much everyone I see shits on this role, for seemingly all the same reasons:

• "Pacifist has no agency and no guaranteed impact. It sucks."
• "All it does is allow the ST to fake Devil's Advocate and force good to execute suspects twice. What a shitty premise."
• "This role would work a lot better if it was an Outsider."
• "The Storyteller will never let this role be good, just ignore it."
• "What am I meant to do as this role? Bait a kill?"
• "Hi guys, I'm the useless Pacifist, execute me, maybe I'll live..."
• "You really want to trust the Pacifist ability will work on this? The Storyteller isn't going to do that, forget about it."

I used to be one of those people. Looking at the role from an objective standpoint, I completely agree: it sucks. It's not good at all having random players survive execution. It's not fun having an ability where, no matter what you do, you can't control how much value it gets. It's not fun being a villager-type role that only exists to give the Storyteller the ability to fuck around with who the town gets to kill, and it's especially not fun being used simply to keep worldviews open in every game and prevent the town from playing well.

However, that's only what you see when you consider the role in a vacuum. Saves are not random-- Storytellers have the ability to control when each and every one of them occurs. Sure, a bad Storyteller can ruin this role beyond recognition... but this is where we have to analyze the choices of a good Storyteller. Just because a role can be abused doesn't mean that it's always going to be abused-- so bear with me here, I'm going to explain how to run the role in a non-abusive way.

Let's address the fundamental "flaws" of the role that are most often seen when it's run improperly:

• The role doesn't save often. Saves are few and far between, and Storytellers are (due to the evil bias a lot of them harbor) always reluctant to save anyone useful, especially early game. This means that the ability often will not get value early game, and fails to be a safety net due to the Storyteller purposefully choosing to let powerful characters die for "balance". Segwaying into the next point...
• Many Storytellers only feel "justified" using the ability to save suspicious targets. This results in the role being a direct hindrance to the town's ability to eliminate worldviews, and often results in a double tap the next day. Evil gaining an extra day off of what should be a good ability is absolutely horrible, and at this point, the Pacifist is doing just as much harm as a DA would while being a Townsfolk who is meant to be a boon to the good team.
• Many Storytellers use the Pacifist to keep the game going for longer, even if doing so would be extremely scummy and unfair towards both the good team's enjoyment and the evil team's game integrity. They save the Lleech host, save the good neighbor of a Tea Lady when the other neighbor is evil, save the drunked Sailor... all to "give evil to have a chance". The Pacifist being used to destroy information and turn fair games into unsolvable slogs is an absolutely disgusting way to run the role; it's is the main reason why "Pacifist is an Outsider" is such a common meme amongst the community. From my experience, evil also doesn't enjoy benefiting this type of play: I've been evil who's won off being "tea lady confirmed" because of a Pacifist. It didn't feel like a fair win at all, and it felt extremely scummy, especially after the good team started (once again) shitting on the Pacifist and the Storyteller for making such an unfun and unfair decision to give evil the win.

While these are obviously not good uses of the Pacifist ability, I can see why they pop up concerningly often. One thing about Storytelling philosophy in general is pretty clear: most Storytellers follow the advice of "lean evil early, lean good late". As a result, how Pacifist tends to play out (doesn't save early, does save late... even when the saves late game often do more harm than good) perfectly reflects that. Sadly, due to this being a common way to run the role, this is why I see the role often get so much hate-- it's just unfun. I cannot stress this enough: even as an Outsider, this concept would be unfun. Having an Outsider who just destroys a massive amount of information with no compensation is not fun at all for the atmosphere of the game.

All things considered, let's take a step back and look at what we have. Now that we've considered why the role is often run poorly, the main issue surrounding Pacifist Storytelling is very clear: due to inherent evil bias and the Storyteller by default trying to keep the game going as long as possible, the character's SUPPOSED intent is completely sandbagged by many Storytellers who fail to run the role. Simply put: the character does not function when the Storyteller uses the role the way THEY would want to run the role.

The solution?

STORYTELLERS SHOULD USE THE ROLE AS AN EXTENSION OF THE PLAYER'S OWN POWER, NOT THEIR OWN.

Point #1: The Pacifist's ability is NOT the Storyteller's ability. It belongs to the player with the token. 

• Knowing this, the Pacifist ability should be used in ways that the player with that token can play around and approve of its usage and benefits. Despite the role being facilitated by the Storyteller, the player with the token should have the final say in how the ability is used. It's very similar to roles like Minstrel and Sailor in that manner: despite having no direct agency over parts of their ability, they can still do plays that help maximize the effects of their ability off the correct assumption that the Storyteller will run their role in a predictable and often beneficial way.
• The role's proper intent (one that nobody ever sees because the role is run in such a shitty way the majority of the time) is to save in such a pattern that's very distinguishable from DA and in such a way that it confirms good players with powerful abilities. Therefore, if you as a Storyteller are NOT respecting that intent, expect your players to hate the role, and expect the role to be absolutely horrible to put into games. As a Storyteller, you want to cooperate with your players, and the Pacifist is no exception: by following them around and gauging what they want to accomplish with their ability, you can (and very, very often should!) help them facilitate their plays when they inevitably do get the person they want to test executed.
• DO NOT run the role in such a way that it obfuscates information from other roles, such as the Fool/Sailor/Tea Lady. Every time a Pacifist save occurs, the Pacifist should realistically be able to narrow the causes down to either their ability or DA-- specifically destroying information and misleading town with an ability that is meant to be the Pacifist's is not only super scummy, but also extremely disrespectful towards the player with the token. There's absolutely 0 way they could have stopped the negative outcome-- they would have had absolutely no agency behind the decision you made, and while this type of mindset is what most outsiders run on, the Pacifist isn't an outsider, so it shouldn't be run in this manner.

Point #2: Meta-able Pacifist saves are good.

• The Pacifist is a guidance-based information role that gains information based on who it saves and doesn't save. As a result of this, the Pacifist does not play like a vanilla Townsfolk.
• If the player who draws the Pacifist token knows that the Storyteller will always save the first valuable townsfolk executed, that gives them a very clearcut way to utilize said ability: direct an execution onto said powerful townsfolk in order to confirm them. Not only does this solve the agency problem, but it also makes the role reliable and takes away the "oops, looks like I didn't want this role to be useful, my bad :)" aspect of the role that too many Storytellers tend to lean into. Two birds with one stone, I'd say.
• Before a player is saved from execution, a Pacifist should be able to assume that everyone who previously died from execution was not someone the Storyteller deemed particularly valuable to keep alive for good. When you tack on this aspect to the role, playing it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting: now, instead of gaining information only from executions that fail, you can information from all executions. You're like a Minstrel-- your job won't just be to wait until you can be useful, but instead, you're always going to be gathering really good meta-information on the gamestate as the game goes on.
• The Pacifist is meant to be very similar to a Tea Lady in terms of design: it is a confirmation role that must direct executions in order to confirm good players. As such, I would go as far as to advocate for always saving the first good player whose death would heavily benefit evil, and to never save anyone who the Pacifist themselves does not want saved. Not only would this elevate the role up to a good position of power (the role is meant to be powerful goddamnit), but it would ALSO prevent situations where the Pacifist has 0 fun during a game because they can't tell if the Storyteller is actively harming them with their own ability.
• With this in mind: in the case of good Storytelling, even if the Pacifist ability seems to work on a suspicious player, the Pacifist can easily assume it didn't because by analyzing the context, you can often easily determine that a good ST wouldn't Pacifist save someone the town would kill again anyway, thus confirming DA. I find that this is a healthier aspect of the role: can a DA still mess with Pacifist information? Yes, but they have to play a lot better in order to do so, which is a fun challenge for the DA and more fair towards the Pacifist.

Point #3: There is a player behind the Pacifist token, and you should respect your players.

• At the end of the day, your job as the Storyteller is to facilitate a fun game for both teams and all players. Too many times, I see Pacifist (and a lot of other ST-dependent roles) treated like Fabled: the Storyteller sees the ability as nothing more than a tool to balance the game, and often uses the ability in ways that the player with said ability often finds scummy, unfun, and unfair.
• As someone who has run multiple games of Pacifist well, I can give firsthand experience that my local group enjoys the role much more when it's given this ability to utilize its safety net nature to test Townsfolk. It gives them something to do early game, it keeps the ability's utility of preventing early losses late game, and it helps the Pacifist player build confirmation chains.
• "But this sounds too powerful! How is evil meant to deal with this?" The argument that roles such as Pacifist and Savant should be kept purposefully weak in order to "give evil a chance" is nothing more than a strawman. 1-2 Pacifist saves might win good the game later down the line, but they're almost never going to be beneficial to the point where the Storyteller directly gives the win to good. Along with that, Evil has the option to kill the Pacifist in order to prevent them from saving people-- they should be incentivised to do that. No more innocent Pacifist-- when the role is run in a respectable way, it becomes just as much of a threat to evil as a Tea Lady, which is the way it should be. 

I will stand by the fact that Pacifist isn't a bad role, and it's about the same level as Tea Lady in terms of power. It's just considered one because most STs use it as a tool for "game balance" rather than as a powerful, info-gathering role.

Summarizing everything, we get this:

Pacifist (Townsfolk): "Executed good players might not die. The first crucial good player executed must not; players you do not want saved will not be."

Let me know if you agree with my philosophies. I'm just a random dude who plays a lot of Clocktower, so obviously, take my opinion with a grain of salt. I just want to leave off by saying that I really like Pacifist as a role, and it breaks my heart to see it being used so horribly by Storytellers. Hopefully, the role's reputation isn't permanently stained by those who abuse it... after all, there's always room for change :P

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